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(FEBRUARY 15, 2024) Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of the far-left Israeli daily Haaretz, published an article in Foreign Policy on Feb. 7 titled “Israel’s Self-Destruction.” The article used distortions, misquotes and falsehoods to justify and promote appeasing Palestinian Arab terrorism. In fact, history demonstrates that such appeasement causes the murder of more innocent Jews.
Benn began his article by quoting legendary Israeli general and politician Moshe Dayan out of context to reverse the meaning of Dayan’s eulogy at the funeral of Roi Rotberg in 1956. Gazan Arab terrorists had ambushed, mutilated and murdered Roi, who was a resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz—the same kibbutz where Hamas and accompanying Gazan civilians massacred, tortured and kidnapped residents on Oct. 7.
Dayan’s actual message was that Israelis must remain strong and vigilant; provide more support for Israeli citizens living near the border; and never be lulled into complacency or forget the Arabs’ hatred and genocidal plans for the Jewish people. Benn misleadingly left out these key portions of Dayan’s eulogy.
Benn omitted Dayan’s warning that the Arabs are “awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path, for the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms.” Benn likewise omitted Dayan’s advice:
Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken. This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice: To be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down. The young Roi who left Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza to be a wall for us was blinded by the light in his heart and he did not see the flash of the sword. The yearning for peace deafened his ears and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush.
The Oct. 7 horrors should be a clear reminder that we must heed Dayan’s message to remain ever-vigilant and armed against genocidal Palestinian Arab murderers.
But Benn twisted and reversed Dayan’s message. Benn falsely claimed that Dayan’s eulogy referred to an alleged nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) in which Arabs were “driven into exile by Israel’s victory in the 1948 War of Independence” and “forcibly relocated to Gaza”—and that those alleged events created the “enmity that produced the Oct. 7 attack.”
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